Fate is read in the routes
of the snails that methodically
spell their own names in the park.

Leaves shrivel
and shiver off of white birch
trees.

Alongside an old church,
pigeons storm a sliver
of […]

The first year of the pandemic lockdown was the worst for Frankie and PJ. Most of their time was spent worrying about the health of Frankie’s Mom and then PJ’s Mom and then as it turned out all that […]

Armen Bacon and Phyllis Brotherton are the 3rd place winners in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest
 

Sheltering-in-place brought out the wannabe gardener in me, a long-time aspiration, with many […]

I cannot separate drawing from writing. Without drawing swallows, I cannot write spring. I am self-taught in art. I am always a student. I observe, I dream and I draw.

I grew up and live in Ankara, Turkey. […]

That’s actually me. I have four kidneys. I joke about it, but with great feeling for what they each signify. Two are native, gifted by my parents. The others are from two donors who saved my life with their o […]

As a Tuskegee Airman, the late Leon “Woodie” Spears was one of fewer than 1,000 African-Americans pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He was among the last cadets to be trained on the gro […]

Melissa Sinclair is the 2nd place winner in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest
 

“Can u go to the parler with me today if u don’t have any plans?”

This text is from my friend Nighat, who is gettin […]

It will be a year, he says.

The sun behind her covers the barman and his wall of drinkery in rosey light. A ceiling fan stirs fry-oil and lemon around them, but she still feels slick with sweat on her face […]

A proposed 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project introduced in the House of Representatives last month is gaining broad support from literary and writers’ organizations hard hit by the Covid pandemic.

The bil […]

The old poet who thinks he is young remembers the young poet who used to be wise.

Twyford James

Though I had my suspicions last fall and tried to hope it along this spring, the venerable h […]

Delia López plans to win her school’s “Make a Buzz!” contest. She figures she’s leading so far, at least in the fourth grade.

On a warm Sunday afternoon in early February, she walks to Elk Neck Stat […]

There are silhouettes of dogs cavorting on the cover, barking and begging, and a misspelled title. Was it so foolish to assume that the first-person narrator at the start of Alice Kaltman’s beguiling new novel D […]

In your final manuscript, every scene should contain a conflict that’s essential to your narrative arc, something that simultaneously captivates the reader and catapults your story forward.

Like s […]

Kate Sheridan is the 1st place winner in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest
 

I wasn’t always a thief. But some losses demand rebalancing. Redistribution. Retribution?

In hindsight, I should have as […]

On a warm winter day when I was five or six, I knelt on a bench in Central Park and watched as water ran down behind a sheath of ice on the face of a granite boulder. Some ten years later in Ivy, V […]

At thirty-seven inches and thirty-seven pounds, I was the second smallest kid in my first-grade class. The smallest was a kid we called Peanut—a boy so tiny, he’d drown in the shallow end of the pool. Everyone lov […]

I get emails and messages from aspiring writers all the time asking me for the one thing they should know, or the one thing they should do, in order to be a successful writer. Well, there’s never just “one thi […]